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Chapter 11: It Is Pure Light.Pure Delight

Osho,What is a natural death?

It is a significant question, but there are many possible implications in it. The simplest and the most obvious is that a man dies without any cause; he simply becomes old, older, and the change from old age to death is not through any disease. Death is simply the ultimate old age - everything in your body, in your brain, has stopped functioning. This will be the ordinary and obvious meaning of a natural death.

But to me natural death has a far deeper meaning: one has to live a natural life to attain a natural death. Natural death is the culmination of a life lived naturally, without any inhibition, without any repression - just the way the animals live, the birds live, the trees live, without any split.a life of let-go, allowing nature to flow through you without any obstructions from your side, as if you are absent and life is moving on its own.

Rather than you living life, life lives you, you are secondary; then the culmination will be a natural death. According to my definition, only an awakened man can die a natural death; otherwise all deaths are unnatural, because all lives are unnatural.

How can you arrive at a natural death, living an unnatural life? Death will reflect the ultimate culmination, the crescendo of your whole life. In a condensed form, it is all that you have lived. So only very few people in the world have died naturally, because only very few people have lived naturally. Our conditionings don’t allow us to be natural.

Our conditionings, from the very beginning, teach us that we have to be something more than nature, that just to be natural is to be animal; we have to be supernatural. It seems very logical. All the religions have been teaching this - that to be man means going above nature - and they have convinced centuries of humanity to go above nature. Nobody has succeeded in going above nature. All that they have succeeded in is destroying their natural, spontaneous beauty, their innocence.

Man need not transcend nature. I say unto you, man has to fulfill nature - which no animal can do. That is the difference.

The religions were cunning, cheating and deceiving people. They made the distinction that animals are natural and you have to be supernatural. No animal can do fasting; you cannot convince any animal that fasting is something divine. The animal only knows that it is hungry, and there is no difference between fasting and being hungry. You cannot convince any animal to go against nature.